If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Comment

I know it well, I have one. For myself, I run Gentoo with OpenChrome, and I know someone is running Fedora with OpenChrome. That said, Ubuntu has how-tos for the VIA driver, and OpenSUSE will almost certainly work well with VIA drivers as well.

I would look through and see if your distro has a "How-To" for it, as that will probably give you a good idea what will work easiest.

Comment

But at least openchrome (besides a VESA) works at all. Not sure about the specific chip here but the one in my CLE266 and CN700 basically work with it, though EXA (at least with KDE4) won't go (only XAA) and there is no 3d further than glxgears running slowly without crashing.
One can mess up some thing by config, though. E.g. I finally managed to install a via framebuffer console on my Laptop (CLE266 VTsomething) but only with accel=0. Accelerated the penguin would show up but all text would be garbage.
So at least I have basic 2d accel working, scrolling, MPEG2 works and that is something.

For xorg.conf you should see man openchrome. (probably there after installation but should also float around the net).
Lots of stuff you can tune, especially be careful with EXA. Might work better on your probably more recent chip, I don't know. 3d should be in mesa, but don't expect anything.

Note: It might be Gentoo specific but xf86-video-via is kicked out (does not compile with recent xorg) and the unichrome is dead as well as it seems (not in Gentoo's portage).
So there is either xf86-video-vesa (or the like) or, better, xf86-video-openchrome.
NOTE: If you do self compiling you might want to check openchrome's svn. The releases have large timespans inbetween and even if it is not the most frequented place there is development going on in openchrome.

If you want I can look on my laptop or search on the net for the commands to build. (basically svn fetch, make and install)

So basically it works, doesn't consume much energy, the VIA CPU padlock stuff is a nice idea but don't expect any wonders from VIA hardware - especially with the current GPU-driver situation.